Friday, August 27, 2010

I don't know about you, but one of my favorite ways to be inspired is to google random things and see what pops up! Today I was inspired by this post by a wonderful mama at The Write Start. She is all about literacy and helping her preschooler to love to read and write. I'm a former teacher, and the ideas on her site are just wonderful to see... I hope lots of parents work with their preschoolers to get them ready to embrace literacy!

Since my daughter is only 18 months, I am not able to employ most of her ideas yet. This one struck my fancy, though, I knew I could modify it for my toddler. It's this one here.

I modified it by doing a limited amount of rocks, and opting to spell full words on the rocks, instead of one letter per rock. We spelled Mom, Dad, cat, love - one word on each rock. (Mom rock was commandeered by my toddler during this photo)

Then I made a few single letter rocks- the letters of her name (so we can assemble her name like a puzzle) and the letters I and S. that way we can make sentences:

I love Mom.Mom loves Dad. I love cats.

I figure we can expand this idea to the whole alphabet in a year or so when she is ready. Let me tell you- she picked up on this idea quick- when daddy came home for lunch, she ran to him with the "Dad" rock and proudly told him all about it. (in baby babble, with lots of emphasis on dada.) CUTE!

The rubbing took more effort than I thought it would, but basically took me an hour of Project Runway to finish. I bought letters that looked slightly aged, so that if/when they peel off a bit with rough play, it will seem intentional! I bought my rocks (ACK- BOUGHT- I know, I really wanted to travel to a quiet stream and collect them peacefully, one at a time...) but they were like 3 bucks at Michaels, and I am impatient crafter!

OHHH- and I contacted relatives and told them that Kenna has a rock collection now, so hopefully each special person in her life will donate a rock and we can add their name to it! PLus, it'll be a nice easy thing to collect on vacations. :)